Turning 27 can be a cursed year for great creative people, but Halifax-based Theatre Company Zuppa Circus—now known as just ZUPPA— hopes to sail through the milestone without joining the ominous and infamous 27 Club.
The Coast caught up with three of its members on a Zoom call, and they seemed healthy and happy. Their beards may be greyer, but otherwise, they show no tell-tale signs of imminent demise.
But 27 years is a long time for anyone to stay in business, let alone continue to be inspired to create work that inspires.
Whether ‘cursed’ or ‘milestone,’ birthdays are a great time for reflection of how far they’ve come, what’s changed and where they plan to go. So let’s do it.
The Genesis
They started for the same reasons most creatives strike out on their own: they were unemployable.
In the year of our Lord 1998—before 9/11 changed the world and the dot.com bubble burst—Ben Stone and Sandy Gribbin founded Zuppa Circus because nobody else would hire them.
And that’s still true, they half-joke.
“We looked around and saw that there weren’t that many jobs out there, and there definitely weren’t any jobs for people just graduating,” says Stone, co-artistic director of ZUPPA, in a Zoom interview with The Coast. “A lot of people were being hired from elsewhere in the country, so we thought we should probably just start up our own thing and make our own stuff.”
And that’s what they did. What was created—Zuppa Circus—has proven to be a viable model for creating beautiful work and being fulfilled artistically. Like all businesses, the main challenge lies in keeping it financially viable, but from an artistic perspective, the rewards are always there.
In year two, now co-artistic director Alex McLean joined the band (the consensus on the Zoom call is that “band” sounds cooler than “troup,” so that’s what we’ll use for the duration of this retrospective).
“I came on in 1999 because I wanted to work, but I wanted to work in a particular way—in a more collaborative way,” says McLean. “The theatre model at the time was that you were hired by the administration to do a certain job—act or direct. We were all people who wanted to make stuff, so what made this different was that we could be the makers and executors.”
Three years after that entered Stewart Legere. He was a recent Dalhousie University graduate and had been exposed to Zuppa Circus through one of his professors—Sue LeBlanc, MLA for Dartmouth North. LeBlanc was an early band member—she joined around the same time as MacLean—and was Legere’s first professor in his first class on his first day of theatre school.
“I met Zuppa through her because we went to see a show—Zuppa was doing a show at North Street Church, which used to be a performance space, and it blew my mind,” says Legere. “I had only seen one model of theatre, and then I saw this show where people were running around me and throwing shit around and singing in multiple-part harmonies, and it felt very adult.”
When a cast member dropped out midway through production, LeBlanc suggested that Legere would be the perfect actor to step in and fill the role. At least, that’s how Legere remembers it.
The early years in pictures
The evolution
Movement. Danger. Weird. Unsure. Those are all great words to describe what ZUPPA does—and continues to do. The world has changed so much in 27 years, and Zuppa has had to evolve to remain relevant.
Legere says he can’t think of another theatre company that has travelled from where it started to where it is now after 27 years. “By following curiosity instead of formula, we have sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed, but that’s why we have a unique audience that follows our work and likes it.”
“At the beginning, our thing was being overtly theatrical and doing as much theatre stuff as we could,” says Stone, “and now it’s like, how do we hide the fact that we’re doing theatre? It goes back to what [Legere] said about our philosophy; with every show, we do something that we don’t know how to do with people we’ve never worked with before and to see what that alchemy brings.”
The people they’re working with for the first time are chefs, web developers, scientists, deaf people and Indigenous people—who change how they work and see things. It’s all guided by the principles of doing new things with new people all the time.
“It all comes back to the ‘rules of play’ that we bring into our rehearsal halls,” says McLean. “Our motto has always been ‘seek electricity’.” Seeking electricity is what ZUPPA has been trying to do throughout the last three decades, and sometimes, in order to find it, they’ve had to step outside their formula.
The middle years in pictures
The future
After 27 years, the band is not worried about running out of good ideas. But aging and being grown-ups comes with its bag of fresh worries. “Ideas and creativity are easy,” says Legere. “The thing that’s hard is getting more tired as you get older; not making enough money and having too many responsibilities.”
But the show must still go on!
This summer, the band is hitting the road in April and May to perform The Archive of Missing Things—a partly online, partly live show—in Barrie, Ontario, with Talk is Free Theatre. They have been doing the show on and off since 2017.
In the fall, they are taking This is Nowhere—a city-wide app-guided experience where audiences find secret performances—to Morecambe in the northwest of England.
“It’s a sprawling project and a UK-Canada co-production, and it could spin off into more versions in other small English towns,” says McLean. “It’s been fascinating to get to know a little corner of the world that has a lot of connections to Eastern Canada; it really feels like it’s an underexplored connection that hopefully more people will build upon.”
Finally, audiences can look forward to a brand new one-man show in Dartmouth in early summer, the details of which will be released soon.
The laters years in pictures
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2025.
